"Equilibrio di una relazione vitale" by Angelo Mangiarotti.

Born in Milan in 1921, the Italian architect, urban planner, industrial designer and accomplished sculptor, Angelo Mangiarotti finished studying at Milan Polytechnics in 1948. By the mid-fifties, he was a visiting Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he met Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Konrad Wachsmann. He then came back from the United States and opened an architectural firm in Milan in the 1960s, before founding the Mangiarotti & Associates Office in Tokyo in 1989. 

Besides an intense didactic activity in many Italian and foreign universities, Mangiarotti designed several buildings in the International Modern Style.
He distinguishes himself in the research of the essential characteristics of the materials and the executive techniques, while as a designer, he gives a very important role to the plastic research. The aim of his research is the definition of the object form, as a quality of the material.

Multidisciplinary in his method, Mangiarotti has been designing abstract shapes during his whole life and thus, while expanding an extraordinary varied corpus, he developed a plastic approach. It is only from the 1990s, in a mature phase of his design and architectural activity that he let this desire for sculpture emerge. 

Equilibrio di una relazione vitale, realised in 1995, appears to us like a gesture  in space. The fluid and rigorous forms – striving to capture lightness – arose from the relation between full and empty volumes, so as to create a dialogue between space within sculpture and in that outside it. A reality in which the sculptural values – the variety of weights, dimensions and forms – are the tie between the force of gravity and the plastic configuration, as it is indeed determined by the influence of the first of this factors on the positioning of the structures – values that Mangiarotti defines intuitively, albeit they can be mathematically verified.
This sculpture not only enhances the technical possibilities, it also combines esthetical qualities with meaningful substance, as to express with such clarity and harmony an unexpected notion of equilibrium.